Artist and filmmaker Andrew Norman Wilson presents a live performance of “It's Not What the World Needs Right Now,” his acclaimed 2024 essay for The Baffler. Moving in-between memoir and institutional critique, Wilson shares his darkly comic, deeply personal, and often absurd experiences navigating the contemporary art world.

In the 2010s, Andrew Norman Wilson had seen his art go viral a few times and had landed four biennials—the start of a promising career. In “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now,” Wilson asks what precisely that looks like in an industry that pays in clout and almost never in cash. Featuring new images, videos, and passages—replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation—the performance offers a candid and often hilarious portrait of the artist while raising larger questions about art, labor, and success in the twenty-first century.

The performance marks Wilson’s inclusion in the special exhibition RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art, on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art until September 27.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Andrew Norman Wilson is a writer, director, and artist based in New York. His first work of video art, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, went viral and was recently exhibited in MoMA's main collection gallery for over two years. His first narrative short, In the Air Tonight, went viral and premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. His first magazine essay, "It's Not What the World Needs Right Now," went viral and led to his signing with CAA.